Home automation networks are good environments for merging sensor networks and consumer electronics technologies. It is very important to reduce the energy consumption of each sensor node because sensor nodes operate with limited power based on a battery that cannot be easily replaced. One of the primary mechanisms for achieving low energy operation in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks is the duty-cycle operation, but this operation has several problems. For example, unnecessary energy consumption occurs during synchronization between transmission schedules and sleep schedules. In addition, a low duty-cycle usually causes more performance degradation, if the network becomes congested. Therefore, an appropriate control scheme is required to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose UDC (Unsynchronized Duty-cycle Control), which prevents energy waste caused by unnecessary preamble transmission and avoids congestion using duty-cycle adjustment. In addition, the scheme adjusts the starting point of the duty-cycle in order to reduce sleep delay. Our simulation results show that UDC improves the reliability and energy efficiency while reducing the end-to-end delay of the unsynchronized duty-cycled MAC (Media Access Control) protocol in sensor-based home automation networks.